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Monthly Archives: August 2009

Is Barack Obama Politically Invincible on Afghanistan?

“A letter of surrender, we did it!  Whew, it’s a good thing too because I really didn’t have an exit strategy.” – Stewie Griffin

The Iraq War is ending.  It is ending excruciatingly slowly, but the President of the United States of America has stated repeatedly that he wants to end the war and he has a public schedule for doing so, one that ends ten months before his next election.  Those are facts.  And they point to a single conclusion: The Iraq War is ending.  Of course, America is fighting two wars these days (thanks, George!), and to understand how the Afghanistan War is going to end we must look at the reasons the Iraq War is ending.

The Iraq War is ending for one reason: the Blues won.  And they won in large part because of the war.  Mired as we are in this recession, and as influential as last fall’s financial panic was, it’s all too easy to forget that it was the Iraq War that permanently soured the public on the Reds.  (Yes, yes Katrina broke the camel’s back, but the Iraq War was most of the weight.)  It was their idea, they bungled it to the tune of several thousand dead Americans, and the public rightly blamed them for the whole fiasco.  In addition to that, Barack Obama won that precious Democratic nomination because of the Iraq War.  The anti-war crowd (myself included) could never forgive Hillary Clinton for her war vote in 2002.  His opposition to the war is the single greatest reason Obama is President.

Unfortunately (and as I’ve argued before), Afghanistan is almost politically irrelevant to Barack Obama.  It is all but inconceivable that there could be any kind of serious challenge to him from the national-security left in 2012.  But even that wildly improbably scenario looks like a mathematical certainty when compared with the chances of Reds nominating someone whose main arguments include “Peace NOW in Afghanistan”.  The only political risk to Obama on Afghanistan is looking weak or incompetent and that can only be exploited by someone from the otherwise impotent right.

Could the Reds actually exploit that?  Uh . . . maybe?  Red fear mongering failed recently, but it’s been successful enough in the past that it would be foolish to dismiss it out of hand.  Still, it seems unlikely that a party that is despised on almost every other issue, out of step with the national character, and responsible for bungling the war in the first place could make a serious issue out of Afghanistan.  This will be even more true if Obama manages to end American in Iraq with a minimum of fuss.

So the answer to the question “Is Obama Politically Invincible on Afghanistan?” is a qualified “Yes”.  The qualification is, normal ups and downs of a presidency aside, that there be no major national security disasters of the World Trade Center/Pentagon, Iraq War or Katrina level.  Assuming he can avoid one of those, he’s in pretty good shape and that means that we’re staying Afghanistan at least through his current term.  That’s a useful thing to keep in mind as one reads about the recent Afghan election, the legitimacy and outcome of which are still unknown.  It’s an important event that will have a profound impact on the future of the country, but the war is going to continue for years, regardless.

This Messy Problem Has No Clean Solution

“Now each one of you take a floor and get started!” – Marge Simpson
“I call the basement!” – Homer Simpson
“Fine.” – Bart, Lisa & Marge Simpson
“D’oh?” – Homer Simpson

There were two further developments on the torture front this week.  The first was the release of a heavily censored Inspector General’s report on all the heinous shit the CIA did to its prisoners.  The second was Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to open an investigation into these disgraces.

(Well, there was a third piece of “news” as well, though it hardly merits mentioning for anyone who has been paying attention to torture.  However, because it cannot be repeated enough for anybody who is still unclear on this point, we’re all looking at you Mr. Ex-Vice President, I’m going to say it again: no useful information was ever produced by torture.  I will now repeat that, in all caps: NO USEFUL INFORMATION WAS EVER PRODUCED BY TORTURE.  That is not, despite what Dick Cheney says, an area that is any longer open for debate.)

There is still a great deal of confusion as to what exactly this investigation will entail, but the justifiably pessimistic speculation is rampant:

Perhaps worst of all, the Report notes that many of the detainees who were subjected to this treatment were so treated due to “assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence” — meaning there was no real reason to think they had done anything wrong whatsoever.  As has been known for quite some time, many of the people who were tortured by the United States were completely innocent — guilty of absolutely nothing.

Manifestly, none of this happened by accident.  As the IG Report continuously notes, all of these methods were severe departures from long-standing CIA guidelines (if not practices).  This all occurred because the officials at the highest levels of the U.S. Government pronounced that this was permissible, the protections of the Geneva Conventions were “quaint,” obsolete and inapplicable, and the U.S. was justified in doing anything and everything in the name of fighting Terrorists.  As stomach-turning as these individual acts of sadism are, it is far worse to consider that only low-level interrogators will suffer consequences while those who were truly responsible — the criminally depraved leaders and lawyers who ordered and authorized it — will be protected.

It would be yet another scar on our country, this one indisputably perpetrated by the Obama Administration, if a bunch of CIA agents face trial while the twisted masterminds of the whole affair are once again given a pass.  There is some cause for optimism though, and it was inadvertently reinforced by this morning’s pre-Ted Kennedy lead story in the New York Times, “Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations”.  The article itself is a re-hash of information that was largely confirmed, rather than originally disclosed, in the Inspector General’s report.  Namely, that officials at CIA headquarters and in the White House avidly followed, from thousands of miles away, the progress of the torture they had authorized.  The Times article tries to make the entire operation seem very precise and well controlled, one document cited even stoops to use the word “clinical”.  What the article fails to mention is that such remote supervision is a bureaucratic impossibility.

People in cushy offices, of any variety, are notoriously ill informed about what’s actually going on “in the field”.  This includes large corporations, non-profits and governments at war.  From that many removes, that many layers of human interpretation and repetition, it’s impossible to have a solid grasp on just what was going on.  Holder’s investigation presumes that there was defined control and that it will therefore be possible to sort the authorized torture (which they don’t want to prosecute) from the unauthorized torture (which they also don’t want to prosecute but don’t see a way not to).  That neat distinctions of that kind exist at all seems highly unlikely and it will be even harder to make those distinctions in a legally clear way.

Are we to believe that one man is to be prosecuted because he used slightly too much water when torturing a prisoner but that another man will be protected because he measured his water better?  The bureaucratic guidelines that were created to permit American torture never had a chance of being scrupulously followed for the simple reason that the guidelines themselves were monstrous.  If you’re already crossing all kinds of lines of human decency and longstanding American tradition, why not press just a little bit harder?  Indeed, ABC News is reporting that some of the censored information in the report is about deaths in American custody (which we already knew about) and the fact that the CIA simply lost some of these men.  Just lost them.

Holder and company have a great big mess to clean up and they’ve got to do it with a Justice Department that was gutted and politicized for eight years.  It is not an enviable task and so it’s understandable that they’re looking to limit the scope of their responsibility.  But the neat lines that would let them do so probably do not exist and once they start digging it’s going to be very difficult to pretend that they do.

Special “Torture Is Not About Politics” Bonus: Glenn Greenwald humiliating Republican Congressman Peter King.  Anytime you can make fun of a Republican torture apologist by quoting both Thomas Paine and Ronald Reagan it’s good times.

Thinking Long (Part 2)

“So anywho, last night we’re playing poker, right?  As usual I’m winning and not realizing it.” – Homer Simpson

Barack Obama has been taking a lot of shit from the left lately.  Some of this he deserves, some of it he does not.  For a list of the complaints we go to Digby from Monday:

I can’t speak for other liberals, but the lesson I’m learning from all this is that the administration doesn’t understand that they need to use their majority to pass policies that work for average Americans, which has nothing to do with rope-a-dope, and everything to do with political competence. Here’s the scorecard so far:

Budget: excellent on paper. Who knows what will happen to it.

Stimulus: Punk’d in the congress, empowered presidents Nelson and Collins, w/probably have to come back for more. Expect shrieking teabagging.

Civil liberties and accountability: nearly total sellout

National security: escalation in Afghanistan, faux withdrawal from Iraq, trillions more in spending.

Environment: watered down cap and trade, probable death in the senate

Health care: strategically compromised, wimpering in the face of teabagging, possible sellout.

Immigration and civil rights: one supreme court justice, push off reform until God knows when

I’ll give her the analyses for civil liberties and immigration and civil rights.  But I don’t think things are quite as bad on the other three.  Afghanistan is fucked, no argument there, but “faux withdrawal” seems a tad harsh when it comes to Iraq.  It’s going to take a lot longer than we might like, but there has been no sign that Obama’s determination to leave (during his current term) has wavered in the slightest.  On the environment, I’d say it’s a bit early to predict the death of even the admittedly weak cap and trade that passed the House.  That fight hasn’t started yet.  The same largely applies to health care, the fight has most certainly begun but it’s far from over.  The White House is behind the public option, the House is behind the public option and for the middle of August that’s not too shabby.

Digby, Paul Krugman, Glenn Greenwald, Bob Herbert, Charles Blow and countless others are disappointed that Obama has come into office and wavered: we thought we were electing a transformative president and he’s turned out not to be.  There’s certainly some truth to that.  But other than Afghanistan and civil liberties, “national security” type issues where the Democrats are still vulnerable, Obama’s failures have been of omission rather than commission, and there’s plenty of time.

Consider that Obama is in the rather strange position of needing good policy to get himself re-elected.  It just doesn’t make a lick of fucking sense that he and his high brain trust are too politically obtuse to recognize that.  The bizarre episode about Obama saying he’s willing to be a one-termer to get health care done is illustrative of how confused and overwrought things have become here in the dog days of August.  If he gets health care reformed successfully it would contribute more than perhaps any other single factor to his re-election.  Yet he put that out there as a way to reassure nervous liberal supporters that he was serious about health care reform.  As a signal of commitment it’s nice, but it doesn’t make any logical sense.

Or consider the criticism that he’s been naive about the power of bipartisanship and the willingness of Republicans to work with him in good faith.  The one thing it is essentially impossible for this man to be is naive.  He came up in Illinois politics, spent four years as a senator, two of them after the nightmarish 2004 election, and then spent two years roaming the country running for president and talking with citizens and politicians of all stripes and persuasions.  No one’s naivete could survive that much raw exposure to American politics in general and the vapid political culture in D.C. in particular.

Now consider that health care reform is the most politically important piece of legislation, for his personal prospects and for those of the Democratic Party.  He and those around him have thought long and hard about 1) how difficult it’s going to be and 2) the most likely path to successful legislation.  They chose to attempt friendly conciliation instead of the liberal warpath.

Like many of the people linked above, I’m of the opinion that the liberal warpath option would’ve worked, especially after an election of that magnitude.  The country seemed ready for it, there was provable popular support for it, etcetera.  But I’m just some schmuck on the internet.  They’re the ones whose asses are on the line.

Obviously the president and his advisors are not omniscient Machiavellis.  That image of Obama as Heath Ledger’s Joker notwithstanding this isn’t all part of the plan.  But there has been no catastrophe yet and all of the setbacks, including those on health care, have been well within acceptable tolerances.  Strong insurance reforms with a viable public option remains the single likeliest outcome, especially if those wonderful members of the House Progressive Caucus stick to their guns (Nancy Pelosi too).  If that happens then Obama stands to reap another reward from his initial good-faith effort at bipartisanship.  He can point to the Republicans and say, “Well, I tried.  What do you want me to do with these people?”

That may seem like empty political nonsense, but I don’t think it is.  The Republicans are far and away their own worst enemy and Obama is giving them all the rope they need to hang themselves.  Lost amid chatter about the President’s decline in poll numbers is the fact that the Republicans are still at rock bottom and show no signs of broadening their appeal beyond their shrinking and increasingly isolated base.  Too often the political chatter in this country treats yelling and screaming about killing grandma and the right to bear arms in public as a cost free exercise.  It isn’t.  It’s a strategy that makes the deep Red parts of the country burn with righteous fury at the expense of losing any remaining appeal to the Blue majority.  That’d be all well and good if electoral power was determined by Nielsen ratings, it isn’t.  My dad said something the other day that put it neatly into context; he said that just because the Republicans are un-electable doesn’t make them un-televisable.

I continue to be of the opinion that Obama’s priorities have been heavily influenced by craven political calculations.  But a strong health care bill is more politically beneficial to him than a weak one.  In order to secure one he’s following a very long, and admittedly very dangerous, political path.  Instead of just steamrolling the Reds, he’s allowed them to embarrass themselves first, and then set them up for the steamroller.  That may be my overly optimistic read on things, but it jibes with what we know about Obama as a politician.  He’s the master of letting his opponents implode while he sits there looking serene, then he swoops in and claims yet another victory.  There are no guarantees that it will work, but when it comes to getting things that he wants his track record is pretty good.

Culture Clash

“Attention American workers, your plant has been taken over by an all-star team of freelance terrorists.” – Not Alan Rickman
“Not on my shift!” – Homer Simpson

It’s been very interesting watching the blog and media reactions over the armed protestors at these constituent healthcare meetings.  First of all, you never want to interview a gun nut about his gun.  You may as well just ask to suck his dick, it’ll take less time and involve less dishonesty.  Because I will guarantee that each one of these guys has his own little Die Hard style fantasies, complete with Hollywood level babes, and pestering them about their firearms just plays into that.

I don’t want to minimize what’s going on here.  Is this potentially very intimidating for other Americans who aren’t armed?  Yes it is.  Does this kind of stupid, macho bullshit radically increase the likelihood that someone is going to get killed or hurt at one of these?  Oh, yeah.  (Though I’d say the greater danger for this topic to cause serious violence is a fight breaking out away from these events.)  But those are the breaks.

But intimidation, like offensiveness, is in the eye of the beholder and in this zoo of country you’re never going to get completely away from it.  I’m reminded of that woman in Ohio from Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary; she was afraid to talk to her neighbors because they were lesbians.  Now, obviously carrying an automatic rifle in public and living in peace with your lesbian partner are two very different things, but both are legal.  So while a lesbian couple doesn’t present the same potential danger for flying bullets as a rifle*, at least some people are going to see each as intimidating.  Even if for no other reason than that it’s unfamiliar.

Obviously this sort of thing is news, there’s no way around it.  But it isn’t big news and certainly doesn’t deserve to be.  This is the kind of thing that ought to be handled in about two sentences at or near the end of any report, “Several protesters outside were carrying firearms in accordance with local laws.  Police were aware of the situation.”  See?  That’s really all this deserves because the only alternative here is dick stroking and that’s no good for anyone but the stroked.  This includes CNN, TPM and even last night’s Daily Show.

The only way this actually becomes news is if someone gets shot.  And if that happens our social betters are going to act like it’s a national tragedy which completely ignores the fact that people die over politics all the time in this country.  Prominent recent examples include Dr. George Tiller and those people in Tennessee last summer, but sporadic, small scale political violence like that is a more or less permanent part of our culture (remember Balbir Singh Sodhi?).  It’s unfortunate, and for the people directly involved it’s a true calamity, but it’s nothing new.  Hell, given how heavily armed this country is, it’s a miracle it doesn’t happen more often.  (And this is assuming you don’t count things like police taser incidents, sexual or racially motivated hate crimes and other forms of violence that our political system doesn’t quite condone, but at least tacitly sanctions.)  Writing in response to criticisms like the one above, the always astute Josh Marshall pointed out:

But let’s be honest about what this is about. The right — the modern American right — has a very troubled history with political violence. The ideological pattern is clear going back at least thirty years and arguably far longer. A simple review of the 1990s, particularly 1993, 1994, culminating in many respects in the tragic 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal building in April 1995 tells the tale. Mix in the militias, the thankfully inept attempt on President Clinton’s life a few months before Oklahoma City (see Francisco Duran) and it’s all really not a pretty picture.

Well, yeah, that’s all true.  I just don’t think there’s anything anyone can do about it.  Even if FOX News, right wing radio and all the rest folded up shop tomorrow that strain of American political violence isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.  My point, such that I have one, isn’t that it’s a good thing for these knuckleheads to be out there with their guns.  It’s a bad thing, it’s intimidating and it’s less than conducive to holding civil discussions.  But on the list of bad things it’s pretty minor, it’s entirely peripheral  (even what passes for debate these days), and having CNN put them on the air with their metal phalluses only makes things worse.  Besides, it isn’t the ones who want to get one teevee that are really dangerous, it’s the guys sitting at home watching.  They don’t need any further encouragement and decrying this stuff from the heights of the liberal media isn’t going to discourage them.

*Unless, of course, they’re armed lesbians.

Um, . . . What He Said

“Wait a minute.  That’s the smartest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about anything.” – Peter Griffin

I have nothing of technical value to ad to the debate over health care reform.  I do not know any of the specific ins and outs, nor can I give you any special insight into the likely efficacy of different proposed policies.  Today’s post was going to be about how the spittle inducing right wing fear over health reform is nothing new and was completely predictable.  Then Rick Perlstein went on the op-ed page of The Washington Post and did almost everything for me (and with vastly better research too!).  I highly recommend the entire piece, but here are the key points:

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president — too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’ signs — too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

Yup.  There’s more:

Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people’s voices means they should treat Obama’s creation of “death panels” as just another justiciable political claim.

Indeed.  And, finally:

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims.

Aaaaaaand we’re pretty much done.  The point Perlstein is making is the same one made by Charles Pierce and Dave Neiwert in their respective books: American Crazy has always been with us, only now it gets much wider play and far less mainstream skepticism.  The whole thing is worth reading, even if only for one of the best Adlai Stevenson stories evah.  I have but one small observation to add.

While this is a symptom of profit mad journalism it’s also a permanent feature of the flatter media world of the early 21st century.  The greatest attraction of the internet has always been agreement.  No matter how particular your interest or how illogical your notion you can find someone to agree with you.  And if your particular notion happens to be that Barack Obama isn’t a citizen, Nancy Pelosi is a fascist, or Bill Clinton is a drug dealer, well, that just means that there are literally millions of people out there to agree with you.

We used to have fewer but brighter media stars.  As recently as twenty years ago national journalism consisted of only three television networks and a handful of newspapers and magazines.  These days media stars can be supported by a much smaller population and in much cheaper mediums.  In this more evenly distributed media galaxy almost any notion can be proven “popular” so long as that bar is set at the mere level of a few million people.  It’s a tiny fraction of Americans, but it’s still more than enough people to fill up a FOX News lineup and get decent ratings.

Minority opinions like these must be heard, and responses must be offered, that can never be forgotten.  But the media threshold for what constitutes a legitimate story and the real threshold have diverged.  This was largely brought about by modern technology, and it isn’t going anywhere.  Calling for a return to journalistic responsibility is an almost useless gesture.

VT Day

“Ugh, I don’t want to play anymore you guys.” – Eric Cartman

There was no six column headline in the New York Times.  No television channels interrupted their regularly scheduled programming.  Internet aggregators did not spike the story to the top of their pages.  No nurses were kissed; no embassies were evacuated.  Nevertheless, the War on Terror, a.k.a. The Long War, a.k.a. World War IV, a.k.a. the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism passed into history last week.

There were hints of this months ago, but last Thursday it finally happened.  In a speech to a think tank, far from the glare of live television or mass audiences, John Brennan, a White House aide on security issues, announced that it was over.  The story in The Washington Independent has all sorts of rich, chewy details:

  • Brennan said Obama will subordinate counterterrorism to “its right and proper place” as a “vital part” of the administration’s national security and foreign policies, but not the lion’s share of them.
  • Above all, Brennan emphasized that the United States was not locked in a struggle with the world’s billion Muslims. He derided al-Qaeda’s self-presentation as a “highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate,” and said that the administration would abandon the use of the word “jihad” in reference to al-Qaeda, since the term carries “religious legitimacy” in the Muslim world that al-Qaeda’s “murderers… desperately seek but in no way deserve.”
  • “Any comprehensive approach has to also address the upstream factors — the conditions that help fuel violent extremism,” Brennan said. Military, intelligence or law-enforcement actions are unable to confront those conditions, which he said include the “basic needs and legitimate grievances of ordinary people” for prosperity, education, “dignity and worth,” and security. “If we fail to confront the broader political, economic, and social conditions in which extremists thrive, then there will always be another recruit in the pipeline, another attack coming downstream,” Brennan said.

Imagine that, a government official talking about al-Qaeda as something other than a globe spanning super group of ultra-terrorists.  There’s plenty more nutritious non-insanity in the rest of the piece.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this as mere symbolism, little more than token words and cosmetic changes.  But many great things begin with symbolism.  In this case, what it hopefully means is a gradual, almost unconscious, unclenching of the communal American sphincter.  A relaxation of the knee jerk fears, stoked and mollycoddled by the federal government for seven and a half years, would have profound effects.  For one, it might allow us to reintroduce some sanity into domestic security policies like airport screening and border controls.  For another it might create domestic political space for diplomacy instead of vilification, for statecraft instead of invasions and endless (real) wars.

Certainly it is not difficult to produce counterexamples to this happy sentiment.  Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan.  He has made drone attacks inside Pakistan routine.  (A year ago they were a secret, now they barely make the news.)  He has retained some of the more odious civil liberties policies of his predecessor.  None of these things can be dismissed and it seems very likely that they will all have negative long term consequences.

While those things inevitably diminish sentiments like those expressed in Brennan’s speech, they don’t totally negate them.  And moving the “center” of American politics away from a war-centric framework isn’t an overnight project.  It took years to condition the American public into reflexively supporting any politician or movement that promised to kill as many terrorists as possible and it’s going to take years to undo.

I don’t know what the practical implications of this are going to be and there’s a distinct possibility that it’s all bullshit, that it will never filter down into day to day American life.  But in this case reality and facts are on the side of the angels because the overwhelming majority of Americans are never going to come under any kind of real threat from terrorists of any stripe.  So while FOX News, talk radio, internet wingnuts and all the rest will undoubtedly continue to pump national security fears into people’s homes they’re going to have to do it without help from the Executive Branch.  The government’s credibility is no longer on their side and without it a lot their wild threats will inevitably seem less ominous.  That should result in the overall levels of security related paranoia decreasing, and that’s an unambiguously good thing.

So it’s worth noting Brennan’s little speech and it’s worth applauding the worldview it lays out.  It’s a good first step and I hope it sticks.

The People(s) of the Book(s)

“Marge, just about everything is a sin. You ever sat down and read this thing?  Technically we’re not allowed to go to the bathroom.” – Rev. Lovejoy

Near the end of Bart Ehrman’s wonderful “Jesus, Interrupted” he relates the story of a young woman with evangelical parents.  The parents oppose her getting a tattoo because, surprise surprise, the Bible is against tattoos.  (This will not come as a shock to anyone with even a vague familiarity with the world’s most famous book.)  Ehrman points out that Leviticus, the book of the Bible that contains the tattoo proscription, is also opposed to eating pork and wearing clothing made of two different kind of materials (no cotton/poly blends for you literalists!); plus it advocates the stoning of children who disobey their parents.  Ehrman uses this example to illustrate a point he makes repeatedly in “Jesus, Interrupted”, namely that it is impossible to distill a universal understanding that incorporates every part of the Good Book.

“Jesus, Interrupted” is a pseudo-sequel to Ehrman’s 2005 work “Misquoting Jesus”.  The central tenet of “Misquoting Jesus” was that it’s stupid to try and take the Bible as the literal word of the divine because there are no extant originals.  Its various pieces have been copied and recopied an unknown number of times by an unknown number of different people and many of the most popular modern language translations are based on demonstrably inaccurate versions.  Back in April Ehrman discussed the reaction to “Misquoting Jesus” in a Salon promotional interview for “Jesus, Interrupted”:

“Misquoting Jesus” aroused a lot of controversy. Were you surprised by the reaction?

I wasn’t surprised because a lot of Christians who see the Bible as the fundamental basis for their faith were taken aback to learn that we don’t have the original copies of any of the books of the Bible. And not only do we not have any of the original copies, but we don’t have any copies that are completely reliable. And that’s troubling to people who think the words of the text are the very foundation of their faith. But I was a little surprised by the reaction of evangelical scholars. Nobody objected to any of the information that I presented. They agreed with everything I said but they just thought I made too much of it.

Mindful of those reactions Ehrman states over and over again throughout “Jesus, Interrupted” that reading the Bible with a historical and critical eye in no way prevents someone from being a Christian.  Understanding the human nature of the book, and the very human way it came together, in no way precludes someone from going to church, having faith, and believing in salvation through Jesus.  That’s all well and good, but for Biblical literalists, which includes many of the more, shall we say, active elements of modern American evangelicalism, none of those disclaimers matter in the least.

What Ehrman can’t conceal is that his book is an attack on Biblical literalism; and Biblical literalists are often religious conservatives who like to cite Bible passages as incontrovertible support for their political positions.  To take perhaps the most salient example we can return to Leviticus, specifically 18:22 (“Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.”) and 20:13 (“If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”).  You see these two (especially the first as it’s shorter and less bloodthirsty) all the time when homophobic conservatives get their cackles up.  Ehrman’s book demonstrates, in clean and simple prose, that those kinds of citations amount to little more than cherry picking.  Ehrman doesn’t mention it, but in addition to the tattoo and clothing proscriptions Leviticus condones slavery and says that menstruation and ejaculation make people so unclean that everything they touch must be washed and purified.  Those passages do not figure as prominently on protest placards and in fiery sermons.

Of course, Ehrman barely mentions Leviticus; his book is about Jesus and Jesus only shows up in the New Testament.  But as the Salon interview makes plain, Ehrman is well aware that it is impossible to write a book about the Bible without it being viewed through the warped lens of political religion.  “Misquoting Jesus” demonstrated that, contrary to what many American Christians assume, the Bible didn’t just fall into the lap of the first pope and come from there on down to us.  It’s a hodgepodge of sources, disputes and ancient grudges.

“Jesus, Interrupted” delves into how that haphazard construction inevitably affects the way the Bible is interpreted and what people think it means.  For those already familiar with Biblical criticism and analysis it isn’t going to come as news that the Christmas story exists in only two of the four Gospels and that even those two contradict each other in numerous places.  Or that the story of Jesus’ crucifixion is told in very different ways.  Or that none of the Gospels were written by actual apostles or anyone else with direct experience of the life of Jesus.  Nevertheless, the book is an excellent explanation, well written, short and funny, of Gospel discrepancies and how they came to be.  Inevitably that means that it directly undermines the thoughtless simplification that religion undergoes when it becomes entangled in politics.

Why is simplification so important?  Because without it religion loses its edge as a political weapon.  Even seemingly simple religious concepts become complex with just a moment’s reflection; political slogans, on the other hand, need to fit on bumper stickers.  The two don’t go well together and trying to cram the former into the latter always ends badly for both.

Ehrman’s book is valuable not because it gives non-believers another rational cudgel to wield against political religion, we’ve got plenty (though it never hurts to have spares).  It’s valuable because it shows, as gently as possible, that Biblical literalism is poor theology and, by implication, worse politics.  Ehrman’s gentleness, and his clear respect for the book and those who take it seriously, also shows that unlike many other strident critics of organized religion he remembers that the people he’s offending are indeed people.  They aren’t sheep, automatons or lemmings and he doesn’t treat them as such.  That in itself is a nice lesson, one that goes well with the rest of his excellent book.

The “Also” War: The Real Reason Afghanistan is Fucked

“Marge, there’s just too much pressure.  What with my job, the kids, traffic snarls, political strife at home and abroad!  But I promise you, the second all those things go away, we’ll have sex.” – Homer Simpson
“I simply can’t wait that long.” – Marge Simpson

Here in the summer of 2009 one never lacks for bad news coming from Afghanistan and neighboring places.  The articles about how screwed up the situation is already make for macabre reading, especially when paired with articles pointing out that we have no real idea what it is we’re doing there.  When the Western war in Afghanistan began in the fall of 2001 it was couched in grand sentiments that allowed pretty much the entire world to support it.  Humanitarians were going to see the end of the nearly medieval Taliban government and cautiously embraced the promises of Western governments that they would no longer ignore the difficult places in the world.  Aggrieved warriors, of the real and laptop varieties, were going to get their revenge for the attacks on America.  There was something in it for everyone and it was the prime focus of the entire world.

That didn’t last very long, and Afghanistan has now been allowed to fester for years.  The warriors got an even bigger shot at misguided revenge in Iraq.  The humanitarians were (once again) disappointed as the promises of the world’s wealthy and powerful were (once again) broken or forgotten.  Afghanistan became the little brother war, rarely discussed as its noisier and larger sibling to the west sucked up international attention.  Today the Afghan war has become an almost permanent fixture of the political background noise in the countries that continue to prosecute it.

This, of course, includes America, where Barack Obama and Joe Biden campaigned heavily on ending the Iraq War.  But when they spoke about Afghanistan they spoke of continuing it, of doing it better; this was little different than their opponents.  In other words, the American electorate wasn’t given a choice on Afghanistan; indeed, almost eight years into the war the American public has been given almost no opportunity to vote on the continuation or cessation of Bush the Younger’s first war.  The result of that is the almost complete neutralization of Afghanistan as a political issue in the United States.  It’s too far down the priority list, too deeply enmeshed in our consciousness as ordinary, to generate any serious political heat.

In fact, it is difficult to imagine a political landscape where Afghanistan is a make or break issue for Barack Obama, heading into November 2010 or November 2012.  Come next November, if the economy is still shitty and the Iraq withdrawal isn’t going well, then Obama’s Blue horde will have a rough go of it.  If the economy is better and the Iraq withdrawal is proceeding relatively smoothly, then they’re going to be just fine.  Afghanistan barely rates.  For 2012 the situation is similar.  If we’re out of Iraq and the economy isn’t in the toilet it’s hard to envision a Republican candidate, even one with impeccable military credentials, winning the election with Afghanistan as a central issue.  Just cleaning up the economy and getting us out of Iraq would be monumental achievements and Obama and his political machine are more than capable of pointing that out to the electorate.

To make matters worse Afghanistan’s political irrelevancy flows in only one direction.  A quick Western withdrawal (which none of the empowered Blue heavyweights are seriously discussing) would play to the political idea that the Democrats are still the weak party on nebulous but gut-check type issues like “terrorism” and “national security”.  But if the Blues keep the pressure on (more troops! smarter drones! better tactics!) it buys them political breathing room at little to no cost (other than the blood, limbs and lives of soldiers and civilians, but those are almost considered sunk costs at this point).

The political landscape in this country is still the one created by Bush the Younger and his cadre of fanatics.  We’re still living in a society that is reflexively jittery about guys in caves and the political cost for ignoring that fear is potentially gruesome.  Years of government fear mongering, aided and abetted by spineless media whores who love hyperbole, have had a profound effect that Mr. 53% well understands.

The politically safe, one could even call it the politically responsible, thing for Obama and company to do is to muddle through in Afghanistan and hope that neither it nor Pakistan seriously deteriorate.  It is bloody minded logic, no doubt about that.  But absent a massive and sustained increase in American casualties it’s hard to imagine Afghanistan ever getting the serious hearing that would make it a politically costly decision.

And so, the Afghanistan War is fucked, utterly and completely fucked, because it has almost no chance of becoming a defining national issue in Barack Obama’s current term.  Iraq must be squared away first.  Pakistan must be meddled with, for good or ill.  Afghanistan remains the “also” war, never thought of first, never receiving top billing for more than a day or two.  It will just keep going until we finally get around to it, whenever that may be.  In the meantime the violence will continue, tactics will shift and strategies will wax and wane.  The grim articles will continue.

From Conspiracy Nuts to Congressmen

“Our tireless safety engineers crash test over 1,000 cars a year.” – Fourth Reich Motors Spokesman
“Hey wait, that’s not a dummy.” – Lisa Simpson
“This exhibit is closed!” – Fourth Reich Motors Spokesman

Note: The posts for this past Wednesday and today are a two part review of Charles Pierce’s “Idiot America” and Dave Neiwert’s “The Eliminationists”.  The two books are very different, but there’s enough overlap that a two part review made more sense than two completely distinct posts.  Wednesday is more “Idiot America” and today is more “The Eliminationists”, but there’s discussion of both books in each post.

David Neiwert knows what real fascists are like.  As an editor at the Sandpoint, Idaho Daily Bee in the late 1970s he and his colleagues initially decided to ignore the arrival of neo-Nazis and Aryan Nations types.  Those assholes were drawn to Idaho, largely from places like Arizona and California according to Neiwert, because it afforded them a sanctuary.  In the vast and scarcely populated open spaces of the west, in the – ahem – homeland, they could segregate themselves from the majority of Americans.  They wanted to live apart from such undesirables as minorities and white people who think minorities are people too.  At first the local media deliberately ignored them, believing that publicity was what they wanted.  Then the violence started.

Neiwert explains:

What we didn’t understand was that the silence was interpreted as consent.  And so, over the next several years, the Idaho Panhandle witnessed a parade of disturbing hate crimes (enough so that Idaho became one of the first states to pass a bias-crime law), ranging from the vandalization of a Jewish-owned restaurant to the harassment of mixed-race schoolchildren.  There was also a procession of extraordinarily violent incidents, including the multistate rampage of murder and robbery by the neo-Nazi sect called The Order and the pipe-bombing campaigns planned by their successors.  All of these acts emanated from the Aryan Nations.

Who are these people?  Neiwert is very careful to point out that they are not caricatures.  Most of them do not look out of place at the local supermarket, they hold regular jobs and are functioning members of society.  They are neither stupid nor uneducated, quite the opposite.  But they believe, and they will hold to these beliefs no matter what, that America is in irrevocable decline, that it’s everyone’s fault but theirs, and that things are coming to a head very soon.

Of course, this kind of apocalyptic thinking (literally in many cases, a lot of these people thought Y2K was going to end the world) is endemic to America, indeed to all civilizations.  It is kept in check by the willingness of the rest of the citizenry, ordinary citizens and elites alike, to decry it.  As Neiwert says, silence is consent; and prolonged silence allows groups like these to establish a toehold on legitimacy.

From that toehold, rancid and virulent ideas can begin to spread.  Neiwert extensively documents the rise of AM talk radio as a conduit for radical thought into the mainstream.  He showcases the way Republican politicians, most spectacularly Trent Lott but there have been many others, have more or less openly courted the neo-Confederate movement in the South.  How “respectable” conservative outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, traffic in provable falsehoods and aren’t called on it by similarly prestigious institutions.  And then, of course, there’s cable news, where even the “liberal” network is overrun with conservative commentators who routinely spin themselves into a tizzy of fact free speculation.

Contra to what the more excitable elements of the left believe though, these things do not constitute fascism, not by a mile.  Instead Neiwert describes them as “para-fascists”, people who, usually unwittingly, make it easier for something closer to actual fascism to take hold.  They do this by undermining the legitimacy of their political opposition, not their political opposition’s ideas, but the actual people who constitute the opposition.  To understand this concept, think for a minute about the alarmingly common phrase “real America”.  It’s a seemingly innocuous term, one used by many mainstream politicians (notably Sarah Palin and Bush the Younger), but upon closer examination it has terrible implications.  Because if there is a “real America” then there has to be an “other” America as well, one that doesn’t count and isn’t “real”; and that means that the members of that other America aren’t real either.  This is the essence of eliminationism.

What is eliminationism?  Eliminationism is when you cease to believe that your political opponents are legitimate members of the same political body as you.  To bring this concept home, Neiwert devotes a solid 20% of his book, in one relentless and exhausting chapter, to eliminationism in American history.  This includes the century long terrorization of black Americans by unofficial, semi-official and official racism, the gradual elimination of American Indians as independent nations, and the terrifically violent discrimination suffered by Asian immigrants on the West Coast, of which the Japanese internment during World War II is only the most famous example.

Eliminationism has its place in American history, and a violent and destructive one at that.  And while it does not qualify as outright fascism it is one of the necessary precursors.  Fascism isn’t armbands, brown shirts or other fashion statements, it isn’t massive political rallies or even a theory of government.  It’s the belief that certain members of society aren’t members of society, the belief that this “other” has brought ruin, and that national rebirth is needed.  In other words, fascism needs scapegoats and the targets of eliminationism provide them.

Of course, in today’s popular vernacular “fascism” is all but meaningless.  It has been pressed into service with such reckless abandon by the left and the right that it has become a bloated catchall, meaningful only to those who misuse it.  In a masterful display of careful research and precise writing Neiwert extracts the lost meaning of “fascism” and holds it aloft for all to see.  It is not a pleasant sight.

(It must be noted here that Neiwert’s Orcinus is one of the Elder Blogs of the left, documenting radical speech since 2002, and that he is as familiar with Godwin’s Law as anyone who’s ever touched a keyboard.  In a marvelous few pages near the end of the book Neiwert explains how the existence of Godwin’s Law has stifled a genuine understanding of what “fascism” really means.  It’s a paradox.  Godwin’s Law exists because “fascism” has become an all purpose insult, but by universally denying the use of the term most people are prevented from gaining a deeper understanding of it, thus perpetuating the continued misuse of the term.)

What makes Neiwert’s book realistic and relatable is his utter lack of hysteria.  He isn’t out there peddling cheap analogies between Washington and Rome, he isn’t screaming about the ruins of the American Republic or wailing in anguish over the misguided direction we’ve all taken.  He’s simply pointing out that while America is a long, long way from genuine fascism, the last few decades have seen steps along that grim path.  Those steps are not irrevocable, nor do they mean we are destined for some blighted, racist future where only “real America” holds sway.  But ignoring them, denying them, or calling them something other than they really are is a mistake and serves only as encouragement.

One is forced, at last, to think back to the Creation Museum, to Charles Pierce and his saddled dinosaur.  The people behind that museum aren’t fascists.  Even with all of their wild, irresponsible and destructive ideas they aren’t even close.  But they have trained their minds to see the impossible as irrefutable, discounting facts which do not fit and inventing ones that do.  As harmless and hilarious as these people are, if their mentality of certitude is pointed in a slightly different direction it can become dangerous, anti-democratic and ultimately deadly.

Stifling their ideas, stopping them from expounding upon their wild theories, is un-American and wouldn’t work anyway.  What is needed is ridicule and deconstruction.  Their ideas must be taken apart and held aloft so the rest of us can point and laugh.  Read Pierce for the ridicule and Neiwert for the deconstruction.

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